Field
This disclosure is generally related to distribution of digital content. More specifically, this disclosure is related to forwarding packets in a content centric network (CCN) by using hardware-assisted hash tables in a CCN router.
Related Art
The proliferation of the Internet and e-commerce continues to create a vast amount of digital content. Content-centric network (CCN) architectures have been designed to facilitate accessing and processing such digital content. A CCN includes entities, or nodes, such as network clients, forwarders (e.g., routers), and content producers, which communicate with each other by sending interest packets for various content items and receiving content object packets in return. CCN interests and content objects are identified by their unique names, which are typically hierarchically structured variable length identifiers (HSVLI). An HSVLI can include contiguous name components ordered from a most general level to a most specific level, and can contain an arbitrary number of path segments (e.g., name components) of unbounded and variable length.
In general, a CCN router maintains a forwarding table to determine how to forward a packet. The forwarding table can be a hash table where the key is based on a name component and the result contains the forwarding information for the name component. Network processors in a CCN router can increase the efficiency and speed of forwarding by providing hardware-assisted hash tables. These hardware-assisted hash tables typically restrict the key length and the result length to a fixed size. This restriction imposes limits on using these hardware-assisted hash tables for forwarding packets in a CCN, where forwarding is performed based on name components of unbounded and variable length which may be greater than the fixed length supported by the hardware-assisted hash tables.